ROHM intros Trench SiC MosFET to make renewable energy affordable

ROHM India has introduced the Trench SiC MosFET technology to make renewable energy affordable. The next step will be innovations for the local automotive industry.

Power electronics is now enabling renewable energy harvesting. Increasing rural-electrification, adoption of home appliances, industrialization and population is bringing more pressure on the grid, and the power generation capacity.

India will be the largest importer of coal, natural gas and oil by 2040. The focus on renewable energy has gone up, leading to increased generation and decreased losses. Smart grid will enhance the efficient distribution of power.

Simlife Electric Pvt Ltd introduced the GAN2000, India’s first hybrid battery backed grid-tie solar power generation system, a combination of grid-tie and off-grid. It is designed, developed and manufactured in India. Power electronics reduces the cost/kW, and enables higher switching frequencies, magnetics and SiC.

Making energy affordable
Energy can be made affordable and achieved by extraction of power from multiple sources that are efficient and cost effective. The power conversion is made more efficient and is always available. It is also less resource intense. ROHM recommends SiC Trench MosFETs for high-power applications.

Rohm’s 3G SiC Trench MOS improves performance. The SiC MosFET is a near ideal switch resulting in low overall losses. Using the SiC reduces the overall system cost. High reliability of SiC improves system reliability.

As for the future trends for wide-band gap (WBG) semiconductors, 10X growth is expected for WBG products by 2023! Dominant space:s are the SiC = 600V and GaN = 600V. Major growth areas are EV/HEV, chargers, solar, industrial drives.

Applications such as solar/wind power, industrial equipment, EV/HEV, large-scale data center servers, and home electronics/AC benefit from the use of SiC.

ROHM Semiconductor India Pvt Ltd (RSI) a subsidiary of ROHM Co. Ltd, Kyoto, Japan, announced an array of power solutions like SiC, IGBT, and gate drivers, for improving the power conversion efficiency. These products are intended to meet the harsh condition of India’s rapidly growing power infrastructure.

The improvement in size and efficiency owing to the adoption of the power solutions from RSI, like gate drivers, trench SiC MOSFETs, and IGBTs, play a vital role in enabling small scale and distributed power plants for tapping solar and wind energy. A ~2 percent increase in efficiency along with the reduced cooling requirements can bring in a considerable cost saving for the end customers, besides improving the reliability of the power converters.

This will help bridge the demand supply gap, which is “more from less, for more”, thus reaching more people. The distributed power generation, besides reducing a huge burden on our grid, reduces the transmission and distribution losses.

ROHM’s power solutions include a broad range of power devices, IGBT, SiC, besides Silicon MOSFET and gate drivers designed to achieve improved efficiency in high power applications.

Britto Edward Victor, Design Centre-head, ROHM Semiconductor India, said: “Our focus is on home appliances, industrial power and automotive. We now work on power conditioners. We released the silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET. It is also used in rural electrification. Rohm Semiconductor India has a design center in Bangalore. The design center has an Application Engineering group to provide technical support to India customers.”